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The first-quarter earnings season is over, a fact for which we can all be thankful, given that it's an exhausting affair, not least for your humble scribe, who must report the results day in and day out.

And that means it's time for: preannouncement season!

That's when all of the same companies that just reported results come back to Wall Street and confess that they might not make as much as previously expected during the current quarter. Well, not all. Thomson Reuters says that a mere 23 of the 36 tech companies in the S&P 500 that have preannounced have warned that earnings will miss Wall Street's forecasts. So, roughly 64% of all tech warnings so far have been negative, which is about in line with the average for all S&P companies that have preannounced, Thomson Reuters reports.

Based on this, you might conclude that it, indeed, would have been safer to sell in May, and go away. Or, maybe if you didn't go away, it's time to tell yourself: Don't be a buffoon, go away in June.

In any case, how much should you care about the downbeat preannouncements?

Well, not too much. In fact, the earnings season we've just been through proves that, in techland, the correlation between earnings and stock performance sometimes seems decidedly tenuous.

Growth has been slowing for tech companies in the past 12 months, while the earnings "surprises"—the margin by which companies exceed Wall Street's hopes—has grown smaller. And the "pop" that a stock gets as a result of such a beat is declining.

On the face of it, tech did much better than expected last quarter, delivering 14.7% earnings growth, year over year, on average, versus the 7% that had been expected as recently as April 1, again according to Thomson Reuters.

That gain was second only to the nearly 18% reported by industrial companies. And tech had the second-highest "surprise factor," a measure of how much better earnings were compared with expectations. Only phone companies outdid them. Seventy percent of the tech outfits that reported topped expectations, just above average for the S&P 500. And some of those companies had made preannouncements that weren't too encouraging.

However, the 14.7% quarterly growth cooled from 27% in the same quarter a year earlier.

Even though Amazon is properly considered a retailer, which it is, I lump them with the others because they're a holding of many of the same diehard technology fans that follow Apple and other "pure" techs.

I am fudging slightly here, mind you, given that Amazon in late April reported Q1 results that were nearly five times what analysts were looking for, thus skewing the average. And that was in large part because estimates up until then had been drastically slashed by Wall Street in the preceding month or so. Absent that aberration, Amazon would have essentially reported an in-line quarter.

The revenue results of these tech titans is perhaps more telling, given that they are somewhat less susceptible to being fixed by reporting tricks such as options expense accounting and depreciation and amortization. Overall, the group beat revenue estimates in last year's first quarter by an average of 3.5%. This past quarter, that number was just 1.3%.

Taken all together, the tech sector's results have sent a very mixed message. Most companies had year-over-year revenue growth, and almost all improved earnings. But the results weren't as good as those a year earlier.

This hasn't prevented most of these stocks from climbing this year, with the sole company not seeing a rise being Google, down 10% at a recent $580.45. Its shares, however, have beaten the 4% return of the Dow industrials in the past 12 months, delivering roughly 12% appreciation.

In sum, you could have basically bet on these companies several quarters ago, ignored their less-than-dazzling results, and still have walked away with a decent gain.

The only company that seems consistently to turn heads is, of course, Apple, based on its ability to keep producing greater and greater sales of the iPhone and the iPad.

Apple had the highest reported growth of any of the companies in the first quarter, reporting amazing gains of 60% in revenue and 92% in profit.

One can debate how much of the company's 22% surprise in profit last quarter was strictly a result of doing a superlative job of gaming Wall Street's earnings estimates. But those growth rates are, in absolute terms, simply stunning for a company more than 30 years old, and at one point left for dead.

Which brings us to this week's center-stage event, another Apple spectacular. The company will gather developers in San Francisco Monday morning to talk up the latest software offerings.

The event could include the debut of new Mac computers. It may also reveal clues about the next iPhone, expected this fall. And some even hope to glean whether Apple is planning to unveil a television, as has been widely speculated.

The thing about these events is that they are now firmly in the hands of the blogosphere. For the past year or so, the pundits and rumor mills have done an increasingly good job of feeding us with tidbits that pre-empt some of the surprise.

No matter. Unlike the earnings surprises I've been talking about, which seem to contain less and less that's stunning, the aura of an Apple event still conveys a certain exuberance, a sense of purpose.

At least if tech's real results fail to dazzle, for the moment we still have the romance of Cupertino's Perpetual Next Big Thing.